Given the choice, yeah sure, I'm definitely going to use a service whose name is synonymous with poor quality, malware ridden files.
It's like resurrecting the name J. T. Ripper & Sons as a personal protection service for lone wimmin.

People are talking as though the whole of the UK has got together and decided to send their shite to Brazil.
Though I don't doubt such a plan has its merits, the summary does makes it clear that it was SOME BRAZILIAN OUTFIT that perpetrated the misdeed: "We'll get rid of your waste for you. Don't worry. We have a safe place to put it."

No propblem. Let Brazil send it back, and let the Brazilians who initiated the wrongdoing take care of it.

Blame where blame is due, please. :rolls eyes:

You're right. Ludditism doesn't even come into it, even if one day electronic books beat the shit out of real physical books on every count.
Books are something you can collect and appreciate for their simple presence on your bookshelf.
It's not just Luddites who'd rather have Botticelli's Venus hanging in their room than a downloadable photograph they can look at on their laptops.

If they didn't have the right to sell the book, surely the morally correct action from Amazon would be to take full responsibility for their error and come to an agreement with the copyright owners for the right to allow people to keep the book. At Amazon's expense of course.

I think Amazon is great, but I'd never dream of using it (or any other supplier for that matter) for stuff I wasn't sure of being able to keep.

"Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon."

Try as i may there's only one way I can successfully parse that sentence:
"Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless [said content is] otherwise expressly provided by Amazon."

The content is certainly expressly provided by Amazon. Whether the qualifier "otherwise" applies or not is anybody's guess. They might well have been trying to say "unless [some other condition is] expressly provided by Amazon" but they don't say that; and the sentence is surely ambiguous enough for such meaning not to be taken as read.
IAABAL (...anything but a...), but I imagine that when it comes to enforcing a contract, if a sentence is complete gibberish it is simply ignored.

You do realise there's such a thing as a skew normal distribution?
Your examples might be skewed bell curves but they're still bells, not inverted bells as 4D6963 was hypothesising. Their cumulative probability is still a nice smooth S curve.
Does their being skewed change how many people fall within the limits you've set for your definition of average? Nope. The majority of people are still average and that applies to all walks of life.

Playing the devil's advocate here: aren't those two works you cite, The Hobbit and LOTR, exactly what we're talking about?
They haven't made a film of the Silmarillion yet to my knowledge.

In English we don't put a space.
But if dargaud is French, for example, that's the way he and every single one of his countrymen have always written question marks.

Nah it's not that big an assumption. Just a statistical one. The population is way large enough to assume with BIGNUMBER% certainty that it follows a normal distribution.
If you do that, of course, you have to set upper and lower boundaries for your definition of average. Maybe that's the road you were going down.

You, Sir, circletimessquare, are my hero. Without even trying you have managed to make about fifteen people look like fools with their answers. :)

This could indeed be a record-breaking post.

That is truly an amazing post. I tip my hat to you and hereby hire you to work for the BBC.

On a more serious note, the original poster should be ashamed not knowing that Australia and Austria are two entirely different countries. Austria is in Africa. Everyone knows that.

Well, everyone who's seen an Austrich knows that.

Thanks for expanding on my "no one really goes to live performances for the technical quality of the music".
You managed to mention just about everything i was implying. ;)

The quality of live performances certainly is almost* always worse than studio recordings, sometimes even dreadful. But no one really goes to live performances for the technical quality of the music do they?

* folk and classical music spring to mind as exceptions.

I wholeheartedly agree. I don't agree with a lot of stuff in the post but it definitely was thought provoking. Some people need to look up the definition of troll.

Clue: it's more than just having an alternative viewpoint.